


too long ago was I unscathed

by philthestone



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:38:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3817519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His are different from hers, she knows. Where his trace twisted patterns across his shoulders, she can barely see her own; small and pinpricked at the base of her back, her neck. </p><p>The agony that they carry has left very few marks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	too long ago was I unscathed

**Author's Note:**

> howdy friends! sorry I've not been posting much here lately - I've put up a lot of my stuff on tumblr and forgotten to post it here, as well. Anyway, I just recently finished reading the Han Solo Trilogy by AC Crispin, and friends, lemme tell you - those books are PAIN. However, I do very much recommend them, because holy HECK are they AMAZING precursor to Han's character arc. Just ... be careful, because there are things like child abuse and addiction problems and all that not-so-nice stuff. 
> 
> Anyway, this headcanon cropped up from reading Paradise Snare. I mean it's BASICALLY canon but it wasn't mentioned explicitly so I guess it's still a headcanon.
> 
> Reviews are someone wrapping these two children in blankets and giving them hot chocolate and forehead kisses I swear to God

His teasing voice sounds incredibly close to her ear:

“What? Run outta questions so soon?”

She throws him a sideways glance.

It strains her eyes. His head is resting directly beside hers, after all, and whoever heard of sideways glances being comfortable, at all, in the least – but she doesn’t dare move her head because if she does then there’s a large change her nose will bump into his and _that_ would just be disastrous, she’s sure.

She exhales. The steady back-and-forth of questions has been going on for the past half-hour, friendly and half-teasing and she finds herself wanting more and more to reach out and grab his hand, squeeze his fingers tightly.

(Make sure that it’s _real_ , maybe, so that she can tell him when he finally goes - _look, Han, look at this thing that we had_ -)

She moves her hands so that they’re clasped over the oversized shirt covering her midriff and examines the crack in the plastisteel over the captain’s bunk.

He’s looking at the ceiling too, nonchalant, tossing up the balled-up sock into the air as he’s been doing the past ten minutes. Sitting still, she’s learned, is not something Han does well.

“No,” she tells him. “I’m just thinking.”

“Huh,” he says, and tosses the sock up again. It smacks the ceiling and falls back down at an awkward angle, catching him in the nose. “Mmmhp – son of a –”

“Smooth,” says Leia, not bothering to look away from her examination of the ceiling crack a second time.

He grumbles something indiscriminate under his breath and she can feel him shift beside her, arm reaching to pick the balled up sock from where it fell, somewhere beside her head. His shoulder bumps hers.

“You distracted me.”

“ _I_ distracted you? Was I making you toss that stupid thing in the first place?”

“Hey, I bet you couldn’t catch it if it hit the ceiling either.”

“Mmhmm.”

His shoulder bumps hers again as he falls back into position, stretched out along the bunk. If she looks down, she can see her feet, sock-clad, resting at around the same place his calves are.

“So take your own socks off –”

“Used socks? That’s disgusting.”

“This one’s used.”

“That is even more disgusting, I can’t believe you’re actually _throwing_ that thing next to my head – ack! Han!”

His face is suddenly hovering above her, grinning. She bats the sock away from where he dropped it on her nose and narrows her eyes at him, and the bundled fabric bounces over, stalled by the elbow that’s now propping him up on the bed.

Her glare doesn’t seem to want to come. She’s suddenly aware of the fact that there are no longer two standard centimeters between their shoulders but there’s definitely barely half a centimeter between their _noses_ and she can feel his laughing breath flutter over her forehead. His eyes are more brown than green, in the halflight of the cabin, and sparkling with mirth.

(She wonders how long this can last outside of their current situation – sublight speeds in a far corner of the galaxy, floating along in Rim-territory space. Sometimes, she’ll curl up in the ridiculously oversized copilot’s chair and watch the stars and space dust as they pass, leaning her head against the chair back. It’s nice, in a weird, backwards, impractical sort of way – just the two of them and Chewie, alone in the cramped dingy freighter she’s all-too-aware she _cannot_ start calling “home”. )

He’s still grinning, a lock of his perpetually-messy hair flopping down over his eyebrows, mischievous and bordering-on-childish and Leia can’t believe that they’re actually here, doing this.

She also can’t quite believe that the next words jump out of her mouth, measured and quiet.

“The scars on your back,” she says, and her voice is not quite a whisper but nowhere near full volume, either. “Where did you get them?”

She can feel his arm tense up completely from its position next to her shoulder. His grin fades, and the tiny shake of his head is almost involuntary.

“Leia –”

“That’s my question,” she reiterates, feeling her fingers pick at the nails on her other hand of their own accord, where they’re resting over her abdomen.

His whole frame goes slack for a half second as he flops back down to where he was lying, faced away from her. The action of flopping is terribly incongruent with the way his arm and back and shoulders have irrevocably tensed, wired taught, as though he’s restraining himself from getting up and leaving.

( _Leaving leaving leaving._ )

“It’s nothing.”

“Hey,” she says. “Fair is fair. I answered your question.”

“I asked where you learned how to shoot.”

“And I answered,” she says. She can hear him take a deep breath, can feel the muscles relax, just a little.

He shifts, slightly, so that he’s no longer facing the wall, and shrugs.

“I had a shit childhood.”

She inhales through her nose. “So –”

“So, that’s all there is to know.”

She frowns, unsure as to why this is bothering her so much. “That’s not an answer.”

He ignores this, and turns his head again to face her properly. He’s smiling, which doesn’t quite make sense to her, but she’s also known him long enough to know when he’s pulling the “I’m about to change the subject” look. She resists the urge to reach out and cup his cheek.

(A stupid urge, because he hasn’t given any indication of wanting to be pitied in the _least._ )

“When’d you even see those, huh? Spyin’ on me when I get dressed, princess?”

She feels her chin lift of its own accord and is surprised when her cheeks don’t grow warm. She does glare at him, this time.

“No, you nerf. You weren’t exactly modest about stripping down in that shower on Ord Mantell.”

He makes a face, pursing his lips, as though disappointed that she _wasn’t_ , in fact, secretly watching him in various states of nakedness. Either that or he’s remembering the unpleasant feeling of being soaked to the skin in sewage.

“Oh, right. I’m surprised you even saw ‘em through all that muck.” His eyes light up. “Say –”

“I was _not_ looking, if that’s what you’re saying.” (Knowing full well she’s letting him change the subject.)

She can see the beginnings of another grin grown on his face.

“Oh, you were definitely looking.”

“That’s not true,” she says, poking him in the side and grinning when his torso jerks, caught unawares. “And you weren’t looking either, I _know_ you weren’t, so don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

“I thought you said I was a scoundrel,” he says, eyes lidded and eyebrows raised. The stupid grin is playing full force around his lips. “Eatin’ your words now, huh sweethear –”

She kisses him, to shut him up.

(She tells herself deliberately that it’s about time she makes a bad decision that will only hurt herself, and not the people around her.)

**

(They’re different from hers, she knows.

She can barely see her own, small and pinpricked at the base of her back, her neck. The agony that they carry has left very few marks.)

She sighs into his mouth as he kisses her, back against the hard mattress of the bunk. His arms are braced around her shoulders and she moves her hands to skim over his back; the skin is uneven and stretched where it should be smooth.

He breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against hers.

She says, then: “You never answered my question.” Her breath comes out perhaps slightly less even than it would normally.

“Which question?” His lips and nose and hands and feet are always warm; hers are not. She traces her hands up to his shoulder blades and feels his lanky frame shudder, just barely, over her.

“These.”

He ducks his head and catches her lips with his again, bottom and top and corner of her mouth, and his right hand slips behind her back, tracing down her spine to its base and lingering. “I could ask you –”

“The same question?” His eyes are dark and dilated and looking at her as though he knows exactly what he just said and knows exactly what she’s going to say. There’s a sort of ache in them that can almost be called tender, if she allows herself to think such things, and her chest feels swollen and too-big and her next words come out whispered, half-caught in her throat, fluttering over his lips: “You know how I got those.”

His hands are warm when they come up to cup her face, elbows digging into the mattress around her head. She can feel the movement, where the stiff bedding dips; the hands large and calloused, the pads of his fingers rough and scraping where they trace her cheekbones.

And he says, “I’m sorry,” so softly that she can barely convince herself he really says it – _I’m sorry, Leia,_ against her lips and eyes and cheeks and hair and collarbone.

She traces the uneven strokes on his back with her fingers and breathes him in, tries not to wonder what exactly he is begging forgiveness for.

(She does not think about her own scars.)

**

“There,” he says. “Under your left breast. That one looks pretty bad.”

“If you must know,” she says, rolling over and catching his hand where it’s tracing her skin, “I fell out of a tree when I was ten.”

“You fell out of a tree.”

She raises an eyebrow at him and wonders if she’d have the patience to count the number of eyelashes on his left eyelid. “I was an adventurous child, obviously.”

“Right,” he says, and grins, looking like he’s trying very, very hard not to laugh. “You _fell_ out of a _tree._ ”

“Is it really that funny?”

“I dunno. It’s just –”

“Not something a princess would do?”

“– ridiculously mundane, sweetheart. You’re not the mundane type.”

“And yet,” says Leia in a flat voice, “here we are, talking about me falling out of trees.”

He laughs out loud, twisting his wrist so that it slides out of her grip and instead cups her own hand, tugging her over so that she’s laying on top of him. She braces her hands on his chest and her eyes flick to his chin, grinning when he blows loose strands of her long hair out of his mouth.

(They have so many between the two of them, she thinks, even if they never talk about some.)

“That one,” she says. “That’s definitely got a story.”

“Knife fight,” he says promptly, shifting his shoulders so that he’s more comfortable against the bedding. “When I was bunking in the Corporate Sector.”

Her first thought is to say _you never told me about the Corporate Sector_ and her second thought is _why does that surprise me_ but she says neither, opting instead to tilt her head and trace the shape of the scar with her finger.

“A knife fight? That sounds terribly dangerous.”

“Sure,” says Han. “Those things actually draw blood, ‘stead of blasting gaping burns in your chest.”

She ignores him. “Are you sure that’s not just some tall tail you’ve spun to engage the ladies? Maybe you got it from something else.”

“Like what?” His eyes are sparkling.

“I don’t know. Fell in a bathtub, or something.”

He snorts, undignified and abrupt and she finds herself grinning again.

“I’m tellin’ you, that’s how I got it,” he says, shaking his head at her. “I’ve never even been _in_ a damn bathtub.”

(She falters mid-laugh and he pretends not to notice. There are times, she realizes, when the equal footing that fighting for a poorly-financed, scrappy revolutionary cause provides them vanishes momentarily.)

( _Poorly-financed; that’s why he’s leaving_.)

Her back arches infinitesimally when he leans in and presses a kiss against her jaw, teeth scraping softly against skin.

“And the one on your knuckle,” she says, determined. “You said that was from a cantina fight. At the Academy.”

His eyes flick up to catch hers; he’s smirking.

“One of many, your highness.”

The words “why am I not surprised” refuse to come out of her mouth. Instead, she lets him move back up to press his lips against her own again, revels in the feeling of his hands against her skin.

His hands stop when they reach the small of her back, and she holds her breath for one beat, two, before realizing exactly where the pads of his fingers are pressing and exhaling into his mouth.

His eyes are green today, open and looking at her in a way she’s learned to catch in off-moments.

( _Not so much a question of_ wants _to leave, but_ has _to, because a Death Mark is not something to be taken lightly in the_ least –)

“When I was a kid,” he says.

“What?”

“I got ‘em when I was a kid.” A faint crease has appeared between his eyebrows, and she finds herself suddenly surprised that he hasn’t yet looked away. Her gut clenches. “The guy I worked for – he ran a tight ship. You misbehaved …”

Her back, too, has tensed against his fingers.

“Oh,” she whispers.

“It was a long time ago,” he says, head dropping back against the pillow. ( _It was a long time ago_ – he’d said that before, hadn’t he, about this Lando character.) “But anyway.”

“You didn’t get them removed?”

Han smiles, corners of his mouth twisting upwards in a way that is anything but happy. “By the time I actually had the credits or resources to do that?”

She swallows, barely stops herself from flinching. _Of all the stupid, ignorant things, Organa –_

“I’m sorry, I didn’t –”

Her words stutter to a stop and his eyes slide shut, head still pressed back against the pillows.

“It’s alright,” he says quietly. Leia lets her head drop against his chest, lays her cheek against the scratchy surface. The steady thump of his heartbeat is oddly reassuring.

“Thank you,” she says, partly because she doesn’t know what to say and partly because she can’t help but feel as though she’s just been handed the end of a loose thread – tug too hard and the whole thing unravels.

“You said it yourself,” he says (she pretends that she can’t catch the hints of hoarseness in his voice). “I knew about yours.”

**

She’s sitting in the cockpit again, staring out at the empty space. Her feet are cold – freezing, really. But then, they’re always cold, so she ignores them and tugs Han’s shirt more tightly around her torso. There is a long streak, on the port side of the viewscreen, of what must be debris from a blown-apart asteroid. She lets her eyes trace the patterns the rubble makes through the black backdrop and does not think about the suffocating blackness of her dream.

The small of her back aches.

Her growing familiarity with the general atmosphere of the _Falcon_ is the only thing that lets her in on his presence behind her – the suddenly shift of weight on the threshold of the entrance to the cockpit.

“You sent Chewie back to sleep, didn’t you.”

She keeps her eyes trained on the viewscreen.“Maybe.”

She can imagine him lean on his right foot, run his hand through his already-rumpled hair.

“You wanna talk about it?”

She turns, finally, and faces him – shirtless and barefoot, eyes still bleary with sleep. The hairs on his arms are standing up from the cold, gooseflesh appearing despite his apparent indifference to the temperature.

“Do you ever –” She forces herself to meet his eye. “Do you ever feel, because of the marks they left – like they’re still somehow … controlling you?”

She can see it – blatantly, even in the flickering, half-dead lights of the cockpit – the flash of ( _hurtangerbrokenness_ ) something indiscernible that burns in his eyes. He is at her side, sitting in the other chair, within moments.

“No,” he says. There’s something about the way his voice has dropped and his eyebrows are set, lowered on his brow. Fierce and insistent. “No, I don’t.”

She nods, once, and looks back at the viewscreen. Her hands feel sharply warm, suddenly, and she looks down to see him gripping them in his own.

“Leia.”

She continues watching the stars.

“Sometimes,” she says, quietly, “it just. Creeps up on you. You can’t get rid of it. It’s always in your head. You know?”

“A bad dream.” His voice is hoarse, though that might just be from sleep – she doesn’t know.

She nods again. There's an oppressive weight on her chest, making it difficult to formulate words and sentences as quickly and easily as she usually might.

He’s quiet for a moment. And then:

“Tell ‘em to kriff off.”

Leia jerks back to look at him, feeling an incredulous laugh push its way up her throat. He’s only half-smiling, and squeezes her hands with his.

“Did that work for you?”

(An inhale – sharp and exact. His smile has vanished.) “Well. Mostly. They’re all dead now, anyway.”

“The people who hurt you.”

He looks away, down at the dashboard controls. There’s a fleeting twist to his mouth.

“Yeah, I guess.”

She nods again, for something to do.

The vividness of the dream is no longer at the forefront of her mind, all blazing oranges and blues and _black, black black black where her escape route was_ – behind her, and once again she was being forced to _watch_ –

She focuses on the warmth of his hands and looks back out the viewscreen again, wondering if there is a word specifically used for two screwed up people who find solace in each other’s screwed-up-ness despite all odds.

But then, she tells herself, biting on her lip and stopping herself from looking his way, even when she knows he has given up his surly perusal of the dashboard to look at her again – she really can’t afford to think like that, can she?

(The ache in the small of her back returns, ghost pains tracing their way upwards and making her shoulders tense.)

**

His shirt is off, but only because he flinched when her fingers pressed into his ribcage.

“They’re fine,” he’s saying. His attempt at a disarming grin is ruined by the way his face crumples in a grimace the moment she prods his side again. She tosses his shirt into a heap beside his jacket and bats his hand away when he tries to grab her wrist.

“Bantha shit,” says Leia, shooting a glance over her shoulder at the cell door. “They’re either cracked or broken, and you’re letting me take a look.”

“Leia, it doesn’t matter, I’m fine –”

“If you’d stop being so damn stubborn –”

He does manage to catch her hand, this time, and squeezes it. Her fingers hurt with the tightness of his grip.

“I’m okay,” he says again, quietly. She can hear the unsteady rhythm of her own breathing, harmonizing with his.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers after a moment, twisting her fingers further in his and hoping the circulation might cut off so she’ll have something to focus on aside from the pain in her chest (something other than the ghost of pinpricks in her spine, throbbing anew). “I’m so sorry, Han, it should have been me, I don’t –”

“No.” His voice is ragged with lingering pain and the bitter taste of betrayal, but his chin is set firmly and he glares at her. “Don’t you kriffing dare, Leia. It shouldn’t’ve been either of us –”

“No –”

“If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine,” he growls. “So _don’t_ , alright?”

Chewie rumbles in agreement from his other side, towering over the two of them even when kneeling, and Leia takes two deep breaths, blinking once to make sure this isn’t all just some horrible nightmare.

“They made me watch,” she says finally. “They held me there, in – I had to watch. I’m so sorry.” Her voice has dropped back down to a whisper, and it breaks in the middle of her sentence, and she can see the blood drain from his face.

( _They can get through this. They always do_.)

“Hey,” he says, even more quietly than before. He leans his head forward and she presses her cheek against his forehead, fingers skimming along the bruising outline of his ribs, around to his back. He’s done an admirable job of hiding it, but she’s been through this sort of thing before, enough to notice – his arms are still shaking.

She’s no longer wearing her gloves, and his skin is disconcertingly cold. Her fingers catch against a patch of scar tissue.

She cannot believe that his looming departure was the greatest of her fears less than a day ago.

(Only – she supposes, with a sour taste in her mouth, that _departure_ can mean more than one thing.)

She whispers anyway, despite his angry words, into his hairline: “I’m sorry.”

She’s not sure what exactly she’s begging forgiveness for.

(This time, she realizes, there are no visible scars at all.)


End file.
